Carbon fiber batteries are one of the latest innovations that the industry is working on, and which could completely change the implementation of electric vehicles in a much more efficient way in every sense.
Sinonus, a Swedish startup, is working on special carbon fibers that could be used as electrodes for batteries. It would be a new use for an element that is quite common in our daily lives, and is becoming more so, but the important thing is that thanks to it, much lighter batteries could be manufactured.
This is the main advantage that carbon fiber batteries would offer. Heavy batteries with so-called “rare earths” would no longer be needed, and their system would be much more efficient in every sense.
In fact, Sinonus CEO Markus Zetterstrom has acknowledged that applications for carbon fiber batteries will go much further than what is currently being used.
Currently, it is used to replace small AAA batteries, but it has been shown that large-scale applications, starting with computers and drones and even reaching airplanes, could be feasible.
How do carbon fiber batteries work?
The great advantage of these carbon fiber batteries is that they would not only be responsible for storing energy, but also, and this is the most important part, they could be used as structural parts of vehicles. That is, instead of having to house a battery in a specific part of the motorcycle (or the vehicle in question), different parts of the motorcycle such as the chassis, the bodywork, etc. could be the batteries themselves.
This would not only increase the capacity of the batteries, but also reduce the weight of the whole, as demonstrated by experiments carried out by Chalmers University of Technology. Their studies have concluded that the use of carbon fibre batteries as structural elements could increase autonomy by 70% thanks to the improvement in weight.
And there is more: these batteries, as we said, eliminate the need to use not only “rare earths” but also other types of volatile substances, which makes them much more stable and less prone to fires.
And that’s not to mention that both their production and recycling would be much less harmful to the environment. The truth is that it sounds too good to be true, but if it is, we are looking at the great revolution in batteries that we have been waiting for.
